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Michelle Shocked: One Stray Shell Is All it Takes

Written by: Jason Notte03/22/13 - 10:00 AM EDT

NEW YORK (
TheStreet) -- It doesn't matter whether you don't know who Michelle Shocked is or much about her besides the homophobic rant she went on Sunday during a gig at Yoshi's in San Francisco. What matters is that you know who she is now because of that one very specific incident and that you as a student, worker, professional, corporate rep, investor, executive, etc., realize how quickly one slur or slip can sink everything.

Forget about crisis management and spin control. As we've seen with Shocked and with Lance Armstrong before her and countless other before that, you get a reputation exactly once. You may be able to salvage some face or dignity later if you have enough good people on your side -- see "Rourke, Mickey" -- but you're living another chapter. There's before "it" happened and afterward, and no amount of repair can bridge that again.

I'll confess that I knew of Shocked long before this thanks to a Lilith Fair stop in Hartford during the '90s. I'm not a fan of revisionist history and won't hide the fact that I went to see The Indigo Girls, Lucinda Williams, Bonnie Raitt, Suzanne Vega, Tracy Bonham, Beth Orton, Letters To Cleo and Neko Case and loved it. Shocked didn't play, but someone out in the parking lot played "Come A Long Way" off her 1992 album Arkansas Traveler and clued me in when I asked who it was.

I bought the rest of the CD and never really got into it, purging it with Heather Nova and Poe CDs during the early 2000s like a felon in witness protection shedding an old life. I'd remember it vividly, however, when Florida-based online radio host Nicole Sandler played it on her "Radio Or Not" show on Thursday after being blown off by Shocked for an interview scheduled to let Shocked clear the air.

Shocked was a no-show and, though she'd conduct a largely incoherent interview with Spin magazine about it that same day, you get the feeling she's not keen on telling the whole story. Meanwhile, the number of folks willing to listen to it just keeps dwindling.

Here's what we do know: Shocked was performing Sunday night in San Francisco and decided she'd open up her onstage banter to include quips about California's Proposition 8 invalidating gay marriage. She noted that when the state decides to "force priests at gunpoint to marry gays, it will be the downfall of civilization, and Jesus will come back" and implored the audience to "please send a tweet saying, 'Michelle Shocked just said God hates faggots.'"

The San Francisco audience became understandably upset and asked Shocked to clarify, she responded with theology and Bible verses in Spanish, and the audience walked off just as the venue cut off Shocked's microphone. By Tuesday, nearly 14 dates of Shocked's upcoming tour celebrating the 25th anniversary of her 1988 album Short Sharp Shocked were cancelled by various venues.

In truth, Short Sharp Shocked is where this whole mess begins. A quarter century ago, Shocked was living in a tenement on Avenue D between 10th and 11th streets in New York's East Village. She was a typical songwriter playing the clubs, but the success of Short Sharp Shocked put her, her tight-cropped hair, her progressive politics and her androgynous, ambiguous personality at the fore.